Communications work is complicated enough as it is. When you aren’t exactly sure who is responsible for what, it gets even more complicated. You can get clarity on important elements of your work processes, like who needs to be consulted and who has the final decision, using a simple roles and responsibilities framework. One popular model is RACI. R = Responsible for the project. This person is the one doing the work. A =...

Patrick Lencioni wisely points out in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (Amazon) that two of the greatest causes for lack of commitment to a project are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty. We often see these two factors hurting the chances for successful collaborations in nonprofit communications. Think about what’s slowing down your communications plan, or the decisionmaking needed to...

Kivi was part of a fantastic session at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference called Breaking Down Silos: Integrating Marketing and Fundraising Departments. Kivi, along with Big Duck CEO Sarah Durham, led a panel that consisted of Hannah B. Kim, Director of Communications at Harlem RBI & DREAM Charter School, Anysa Holder, Director of Marketing at Easterseals New Jersey, and Cindy Olnick, Director of Communications at...

In brand-new research for the 2017 edition of the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, we discovered that four types of communications teams are most prevalent in our sector. While those teams are equally distributed, that’s really where the similarities end. Only two of the team models — Integrated and Centralized — performed well on the various questions we asked about communications effectiveness. What...

Yesterday I introduced you to some of the concepts from Donald Sull’s and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt’s Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon). We looked at three kinds of simple rules that provide frameworks for making better decisions: Boundary Rules, Prioritizing Rules and Stopping Rules. Today, let’s look at three more, this time related to work processes, or how to do things better. They are...

In their book, Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World (Amazon), Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt define simple rules as “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information.” They help us simplify complex systems and decisions so that we can move more quickly through our daily lives at work and home. “Never go on a second date...